What is this 'protecting effort'? What does it even mean? You seem to be advancing this as grounds for justifying copyright, but to do that it must have some meaning independent from copyright. Otherwise it is going in circles.

The substantial question here is more basic: are plenty of things being produced, and do we have easy access to them?

We want to pay people to do work (to some significant extent). Copyright is a troublesome and inefficient way to do that now. So we should start doing it in other ways -- see what the market produces, adapt some already existing, invent some new ones.

If people are paid sufficiently to produce, or just if plenty of stuff is produced by whatever ways, what (else) is/isn't/needs to be 'protected'? (We can perhaps have laws for proper attribution, but that is not really a matter of copyright.) Do we want to 'protect' information from being copied? No, of course not: on the contrary, we want it to be spread and used and adapted.

This idea of 'protecting effort' is gone along with copyright. It only means something if we believe in copyright -- if we do not, it disappears.